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Updated: June 7, 2025
The torture of the heavy pack nearly killed him; but in time, as his muscles developed, he was able to slog along under the burden. He even learned to dig. That was the worst and most back-breaking art of all. Now and then Phineas McPhail and himself would get together and walk into the little seaside town.
"What do you want to know for?" asked the gombeen man, when at the end of Paddy's back-breaking six months, Paddy and his father brought him the fifteen dollars and asked how much they still owed. The gombeen man refuses accounts to everyone but the priest, magistrate, doctor and teacher. "What do you want to know how much you owe for? Unless you want to pay me all off?"
"There now!" said he, when everything was ready, "there's no back-breaking about this; you can stand right up under it, you see: jist try it once"; and he politely rested the blade of the oar on my comrade's right shoulder, and the other end on mine, leaving the barrel between us. "Jist the thing!" he added, standing off admiringly, while we remained in this interesting attitude.
The stalk, from an inch to two inches in thickness, is chopped down near the root, the heavy knife swung with cut after cut, under a burning sun. Only the strongest can stand it, a wearying, back-breaking task. After cutting, the stalk is trimmed and loaded on carts to be hauled, according to distance, either directly to the mill or to the railway running thereto.
The foreman jumped on the truck and rode away, and Archie bent his back to the barrow, resolving that never again would he complain of bumps in a road now that he knew the heart-breaking and back-breaking labor of road-mending. On the whole he did a good job; it was remarkable how interested one could become in so contemptible a task.
To such old men, who probably had never lifted the smallest and lightest tool for many years, if ever, it was a back-breaking task. However, they clung dutifully to their work until the hour of twelve rang out. Now they were re-marshalled, their tools were re-shouldered, and they were marched back to camp for the mid-day meal.
Driving the pick and shovel in the rebellious ground was back-breaking in the hot sun and it had to be maintained without pause or slackening. When the post had been planted the wire-pulling gang came along.
Before the table was a hanging drum, and behind it was one of those high, back-breaking arm-chairs which adorn every Buddhist temple.
From the receiving corral three Mexicans in slouched hats and jumpers drove the sheep into a broad chute, yelling and hurling battered oil cans at the hindmost; by the chute an American punched them vigorously forward with a prod, and yet another thrust them into the pens behind the shearers, who bent to their work with a sullen, back-breaking stoop.
That was in truth the marvel of the scene, for every man on the Chilkoot was bent beneath a back-breaking load. Three miles down the gulch, where the upward march of the forests had been halted, there, among scattered outposts of scrubby spruce and wind-twisted willow, stood a village, a sprawling, formless aggregation of flimsy tents and green logs known as Sheep Camp.
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